On Tuesday afternoon, The New York Times is expected to announce the appointment of Cliff Levy, a veteran reporter, editor, and digital-newsroom seer of sorts, to lead the metro section. On one level, the appointment is being presented as a solution to two immediate problems. First, the metro-editor position unexpectedly opened up with the abrupt departure in May of Wendell Jamieson, who left the Times amid a still-unspecified investigation into workplace communications that fell somewhere along the broad and complex #MeToo spectrum. Furthermore, the Times appears to be reprioritizing local news as its competitors in the space falter. Tronc, the notoriously ham-handed parent company of the New York Daily News, recently slashed the tabloid’s staff in half. The Village Voice and New York Observer are digital-only imitations of their former identities. Even the Times itself has missed a beat or two. Former executive editor Jill Abramsonrecently tweeted a dig at her old employer for not being all over the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Current executive editor Dean Baquet’s decision to appoint Levy appears to fly in the face of tradition. The metro-editor job, after all, has typically been passed down to one of the department’s deputies, and it’s a position that’s always been seen as a crucial stepping stone at the Times. The legendary Times-man A.M. Rosenthal began his rise to the top of the masthead when he was put in charge of metro back in 1963. (Among the executive editors to date, in fact, he was the only metro editor to go on to run the paper.) More recently, Carolyn Ryan went on to become Washington bureau chief and then politics editor after her turn running metro ended in 2013, and she has since been appointed to the masthead.

Levy, on the other hand, is already one of the paper’s most senior journalists. He is also one of three deputy managing editors whose names appear directly below Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn on the Times masthead. Nevertheless, Baquet began talking to Levy about the job earlier this month. Then the Daily News bloodbath expedited his thinking that he needed to hand the section to an experienced newsroom leader. “It made him feel even more strongly that this is the right thing to do,” a person familiar with Baquet’s thinking told me. (Baquet and Levy declined to comment for this article.) Levy was chosen over a handful of strong internal contenders who are impressive in their own right, such as Dean Chang and Amy Virshup, the current metro deputies; Mary Suh, formerly deputy editor for culture; and Sewell Chan, a former op-ed deputy who currently serves as a New York-based editor on the international desk, and who first made a name for himself as a prolific metro scribe once dubbed, in a 2006 New York Observer column by my colleague Gabriel Sherman, the “Byline Beast of N.Y.”

But the real story behind the Levy appointment has implications beyond what happens at metro. Levy is a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter and former deputy metro editor. He’s had a swift rise over the past few years, becoming a top newsroom figure overseeing the news desk, social media, and various digital-media initiatives. The position will take him off the print masthead, but it may offer a more positive long-term outcome. In fact, according to Times sources familiar with the process, the move was pitched to Levy as an important gesture, and one that would make him a stronger candidate for executive editor when the time comes. (Baquet turns 62 in September. Executive editors generally step down by age 65.) That appointment, of course, will ultimately be up to A.G. Sulzberger, who succeeded his father as publisher in January and recently notched his most newsworthy moment in the job thus far: a very public battle over journalism with Donald Trump. Sources told me Sulzberger supports Levy as metro editor, and that Baquet has been focused on ensuring that Sulzberger has an array of candidates in line to succeed him, in addition to the two that are most commonly mentioned: Kahn and editorial-page editor James Bennet.

The expectation is that Levy will be given the resources and bandwidth to position the section for a return to growth. During Jamieson’s tenure, which commenced in 2013, the Times continued to grapple with the fallout of its age-old business model. Five years earlier, metro had already ceded its prime real estate as a stand-alone weekday section. Then, as the Times began preaching the gospel of global and resources were pumped into the type of national and international coverage that could attract as wide a paying audience as possible, especially online, metro was forced to retrench further, abandoning the incremental local coverage so many New Yorkers relied on, but trying to make up for it by focusing on big enterprise features that could pop with readers around the country and the world. Then along came Trump, who began to eat up even more of the Times’ resources and attention as millions of readers became glued to the publication’s unrelenting political reportage. Within metro, staffers couldn’t help feeling a bit like redheaded stepchildren, and the section’s leaders clashed with management over resources and the direction of the department. At its most tense, the dynamic resulted in a screaming match between Jamieson and Baquet in the latter’s office last year, people familiar with the incident told me, adding that the two men later smoothed things out.

Baquet has since acknowledged to staff that metro hasn’t been given the attention it deserves. During a meeting with the department after Jamieson left, he said it was possible the Times could end up being the only metro newspaper left standing in New York. Last year, when Baquet was onstage at a conference hosted by the Web site Recode, the conversation turned to what Baquet believes is the biggest crisis facing American journalism, at a time when the news business is under siege thanks to Google and Facebook, and the president of the United States repeatedly calls the press the “enemy of the people.” Baquet’s answer? “Local news.” If Levy proves him right, he may well earn his chance to climb to the top of the pole.